Letters: In Infamy

May 7, 2015

To the Editor:

The review of “Infamy,” by Richard Reeves, and “The Train to Crystal City,” by Jan Jarboe Russell (April 26), opens with the phrase, “In the days after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. . . . ”

The use of the word “sneak,” with its connotation of underhandedness, to describe this attack is as outdated as the idea of interning Japanese-Americans, and it is not unrelated. When the National Park Service produced a new film to show visitors to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in the 1990s, it no longer used “sneak attack” but instead described it as a “surprise attack.”

Political correctness can go off the rails on occasion, but this is not such a case. The word “sneak” does not belong in a review of books like these.

MICHAEL ALLEN

BROOKLYN

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To the Editor:

In his generally excellent review of two books about the World War II internment policies of the United States, Evan Thomas unaccountably fails to mention the post-9/11 reprise of such practices.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States government subjected hundreds of Muslim men to indefinite detention (and, in many instances, to ultimate deportation) chiefly on the basis of their religion and/or ethnicity. And it continues to subject the Islamic community to extensive monitoring and surveillance — trolling for suspects online and in mosques and other gathering places, and manufacturing numerous crimes for prosecution and draconian punishment through the use of provocateurs and informers. The sad fact is that civil rights and liberties remain in great peril, and we are still at substantial risk of a return to the age of discriminatory internment and persecution in this country. All it will take is another major terrorist attack on the order of 9/11, or a spate of smaller outrages like those that occurred at Fort Hood, Tex., and in Boston, for craven political “leaders” (regardless of party) to react in the same deplorable way.

JOHN S. KOPPEL

BETHESDA, MD.

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Between Us

To the Editor:

“ ‘It is me’ is faultless English,” Patricia T. O’Conner proclaims in her review of “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” (April 19). It may be grammatically correct, but it is faultless only to those with tin ears for English diction.

JONATHAN MIDDLEBROOK

REDWOOD VALLEY, CALIF.

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Read All About It

To the Editor:

Kevin Young, in his review of “The Sellout,” by Paul Beatty (April 12), says, “If poetry, per Lucille Clifton, means to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, satire says one out of two ain’t bad.”

Clifton often used that phrase when speaking about her poetry, but she was quoting the journalist (and humorist) Finley Peter Dunne, my grandfather.

Starting in the 1890s, Dunne published Irish-dialect sketches commenting on politics and society in the voice of Martin Dooley, a Chicago saloonkeeper. In the 1902 book “Observations by Mr. Dooley,” Dunne famously wrote:

Pico Iyer praises David Brooks for “seeing consistency as the hobgoblin of little minds.” He is alluding to Emerson’s statement in “Self-Reliance” that the hobgoblin in question is “a foolish consistency,” which means something quite different. Anybody who aspires to deploy this aphorism ought to rent the movie “Next Stop Wonderland.” Hope Davis plays an unlucky-in-love nurse who dates a succession of clueless men. Each one, in an attempt to impress her, cites this line and gets it wrong. At film’s end, a young, handsome and intelligent plumber (and student of marine biology) wins her heart when he says, “Actually, it’s a foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

DAVID ENGLISH

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

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To the Editor:

In his review of “The Road to Character,” by David Brooks (April 26), Pico Iyer writes, “Perhaps the best thing one can say about the book is that in each of its sentences lurks a whole volume for a thoughtful Adam II to tease out and refine.” That’s something I’ve always thought true of a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay. Not bad company for David Brooks, I’d say.

ROBERT BARRETT

WEST MYSTIC, CONN.

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What One Does Not Know

To the Editor:

The Latin phrase ignoti nulla cupido (“One does not desire what one does not know”) may have become a “Catholic aphorism,” as Kevin Carey says in using it to characterize those who oppose sex education (“Shortlist: Education,” April 19), but the expression has an older pagan source: It comes from the Roman poet Ovid’s decidedly unprudish “Ars Amatoria” (The Art of Love).